Managed Migrations: Growers, Farmworkers, and Border Enforcement in the Twentieth Century by Cristina Salinas (review)

In Managed Migrations, Cristina Salinas covers familiar ground for historians of Texas, but by mining underused sources and utilizing a small number of new oral interviews, she delivers a ground-level view of labor relations and immigration control in the Texas–Mexico border region. The book does not seem designed for non-specialists, with little space given to explain the development of border agriculture or its regional and national context. However, for scholars of labor, migration, agriculture, and the U.S.–Mexico border, it provides textured, engaging coverage of border labor issues.

Across six chapters, Salinas examines an interlocking set of themes that came to define the labor and immigration system in the lower Rio Grande Valley and El Paso. The first two chapters focus on the world that farm promoters and landowners claimed to have built from scratch: a world fueled by crooked business practices, pretensions of mastery, and self-serving paternalism. Salinas deepens this familiar narrative by digging further than most previous historians into the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley’s John Shary Collection. She also deftly uses Carrol Norquest as an exemplar of the farmers’ self-image as protectors of their labor force against law enforcement, labor contractors, and other imagined enemies. Norquest’s book Rio Grande Wetbacks (University of New Mexico Press, 1972) has been used by many historians to explicate growers’ self-serving arguments, but Salinas provides a fascinating counterpoint to Norquest’s glib memoir by interviewing surviving members of a Mexican family that worked for Nor-quest, offering a new set of voices to help narrate this history.

Chapter 3 moves on to a localized history of enforcement actions by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol from the 1930s to the 1950s. Salinas drew much of her evidence for this chapter from underutilized National Archives records that provide ample new evidence of corruption, collusion with growers, and selective enforcement. The argument is not necessarily new, but Salinas has added fascinating details. Chapter 4 shifts to an examination of efforts by the U.S., Mexican, and Texas governments to “protect” workers from labor contractors, depicted by growers and bureaucrats as agents of exploitation. Salinas shows that these campaigns, well-meaning rhetoric aside, emerged from demands to rationalize the migrant labor system to make it more legible and controllable for growers and their allies in government. Chapter 5 proceeds along similar lines, highlighting the 1948 “El Paso incident” in which the U.S. government and Texas growers consciously violated the bi-national Bracero Program, pointing out both the high-handed actions of U.S. officials and the individual actions of Mexican workers who sought to use the breach for their own opportunity.

The final chapter explains the combined efforts of the American G.I. Forum and the Texas State Federation of Labor to publicize undocumented migration as a social and economic problem that demanded governmental action. The labor federation and the Mexican American civil rights organization argued that the INS and Border Patrol colluded with growers and allowed undocumented migration to hurt Mexican American communities. They sought more rigid enforcement (for instance, cheering on “Operation Wetback,” the 1954 deportation campaign) as a way to ease economic problems in Mexican American communities and to challenge conservative control of the Texas state government. This effort did not achieve its goals, but Salinas shows that it increased the volume of anti-Mexican sentiment and left behind a complicated historical legacy of nativism.

My only criticism of Salinas’s book is the historiographic straw man that frames her introduction. She argues that previous historians have fallen into one of two camps: “those emphasizing the gradual hardening of border laws and infrastructure, and those emphasizing the continued movement of people, commodities, and ideas across the border” (7). While her rejection of a dichotomous relationship between these two notions is unobjectionable, she ignores or miscasts the ways in...